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Class 7: the Protestant Ethic

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Class 7: the Protestant Ethic Class 7: The Protestant Ethic A. One Pilgrim’s Progress 1. Title Slide 1 (Henry Melville: Illustration to The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1835) One day last semester, when I announced this course and explained its personal importance to me, Paul joked that this would not be a course but an intervention! I have stayed away from the over-personal on the whole, but my preparation for this class has taken me back so strongly that I am going to indulge those memories, at least for the first few minutes. The class was advertised as The Protestant Reformation, starting with Martin Luther, and we will indeed go back to him. I shall focus on one aspect of his legacy in particular: Protestant Humanism, Protestant Populism, or simply the Protestant Ethic. 2. Michael Brunyate: The Land of Adventure, first sketch for a game board You probably see me as a sophisticate, at home with Raphael and Rubens, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Yet I had barely seen any masterpieces of world art by the time I signed up for an Art History degree at Cambridge. This was the art I grew up with, drawn by my own father. He was not an artist but an engineer, trained to use a parallel rule and drafting pen. Yet he got it into his head to make a board game based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, play it with me as an ongoing moral lesson, and possibly market it as a kind of Christian Monopoly. Well, he didn’t get very far before the board was larger than our dining-room table; this is just a sketch for one corner of it. Before long, he had turned his ideas into a slide show, which he toured Northern Ireland presenting in churches. And then, rather than talking himself, he wrote an hour-long radio play which we all recorded—family, friends, and neighbors—then added music and played it along with the slides. But first, let’s look back at the original. 3. Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress, title page, with portraits of the author John Bunyan (1628–88) was a tinker’s son from near Bedford in Eastern England; he took up his father’s trade, and followed his somewhat conventional religious views. However, meeting by chance with some Puritans, he was converted to their cause, becoming a lay preacher and a prolific writer. Conditions in Commonwealth England after the Civil War made such activities possible. But he refused to stop preaching when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, and was thrown into jail for twelve years. It was there that he began work on The Pilgrim’s Progress. 4. The Pilgrim’s Progress map, 1813 In a great tradition dating back to Piers Plowman at least, Bunyan tells his story “under the similitude of a dream.” In it, the pilgrim, whose name is Christian, leaves the City of Destruction and, after surmounting many challenges to his faith, crosses the River of Death to arrive at the Celestial City. My father was not to know, but there are several existing maps of The Pilgrim’s Progress, and it would not be hard to adapt the early 19th-century one seen here into a kind of Chutes and Ladders. But his aim — 1 — was not to create a work of art, so much as to use art first to develop his own thoughts, and then as a teaching tool for others; he was diagramming rather than drawing. Bunyan was also such a teacher. 5. Map detail, with Vanity Fair 6. Michael Brunyate: Attractions in Vanity Fair My father was also concerned to reinterpret the story in terms of the world of the 1950s, though it now seems hopelessly dated. Here is the Vanity Fair section from the 1813 map (note the Pope in the Cave of Darkness reserved for the Pagans!), and here is one of my father’s scenes from the fair: Tongue- Waggers’ Hall and the Maze of Indulgence. Further to the right in the original was a roller-coaster that never returned to base, called “The Ride of Thrills to the Barren Hills.” It was from lessons like these that—for good or ill—I was taught the creed of self-denial. 7. Map detail (1813), with the Hill Difficulty 8. Michael Brunyate: The Hill Difficulty Or look at the map version of Hill Difficulty together with my father’s version. Amateur though he was, I think this is one of the best of his drawings, not only for its grandeur and scale, but also for its theology. If you look at the signpost at the bottom, the creed of self-denial is right there in force. But it is interesting that he also condemns “Goodness” as a short-cut. As you go up the hill, you will see the churches—presumably the prime purveyor of goodness—either abandoned or propped up by flimsy scaffolding. This Protestantism virtually discards the established church in favor of individual responsibility. [Incidentally, my father used to take me mountain climbing from an early age. I suspect that those expeditions, which I very much enjoyed, served the role of moral education too!] 9. Michael Brunyate: The Valley of the Shadow and The Celestial City This is a moral rather than a sacred art; didactic rather than devotional, it places teaching over transcendence. Yet there are times when you need to transcend. Sensing this, my father experimented with oil painting for his climactic slides. With the Hallelujah Chorus ringing out too, they got applause after so much black and white. But they are not adequate as pictures. For that, you need a Rubens. Bunyan summed up the spirit of his book in the well-known hymn “To be a Pilgrim,” most often sung to the traditional melody adapted by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). This is a performance by Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band. The illustrations are by a contemporary artist, Mike Wimmer, albeit painting in the style of at least a century earlier. 10. Bunyan/Vaughan Williams: “To be a Pilgrim” — 2 — B. Three Artists of the Reformation 11. Cranach: Martin Luther (1532, Dresden), with bullet points So how did this shift from devotional to didactic art come about? It all began with Martin Luther (1483– 1546). I have listed a few bullet points about him on the slide: • He was ordained a priest in 1507, and immediately began his work as a scholar, preacher, and writer. • In 1517, he published the Ninety-five Theses Against Indulgence (the practice of selling spiritual “get out of jail free” cards to raise money for the Church). • In 1521, he was excommunicated. • He wrote that Salvation is the free gift of God, obtainable only through faith, not by deeds or indulgence. • He wrote that the Bible is the only absolute authority, not the Church, not the Pope. • He considered that every baptized Christian is a member of a holy priesthood. • He translated the Bible into German (though he was not the first to do so), making it accessible to every educated German. • He wrote numerous hymns, some of which we will examine later. • While he opposed the use of images as objects of devotion, he saw the value of art as a means of instruction. Unfortunately. I also have to say that Luther was intolerant of most other religions, not just Roman Catholicism, but some other Protestant sects and especially Judaism. 12. Luther Bible: first chapter of Revelation, with tinted woodcut by Lucas Cranach Look at this slide. It is an opening from what is obviously a deluxe printing of the Luther Bible, with hand-colored woodcut illustrations. I think this is by Lucas Cranach (1472–1553), but am not sure. Unlike the fiercely iconoclastic Calvanists, Luther not merely tolerated art, but encouraged it as an educational tool. And with a subject as obscure as the Revelation, illustrations would certainly be helpful. 13. Cranach: Martin Luther (1532, Dresden), with Dürer, Cranach, and Grünewald The Lutheran Church does not worship saints, but it does commemorate certain people on given days of the year. Three German artists share April 6, all contemporaries of Luther himself: Matthias Grünewald (c.1475–1528). Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), and Lucas Cranach (1472–1553). Cranach, as we have seen, was a friend of Luther’s, his frequent portraitist, and illustrator of his Bible; we shall see more of his work in a moment. Dürer never left the Catholic Church and never met Luther, although he wished to do so; his later work is Protestant in all but name. Grünewald apparently left at his death a number of Luther’s sermons, and his translation of the New Testament, which the auctioneers discarded as “Lutheran trash.” But his surviving paintings make him, at first glance, an unlikely candidate for Lutheran veneration. What could be more Catholic than these panels from his Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–15)? — 3 — 14. Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece: Annunciation, Angel Concert, Madonna, Resurrection 15. Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece (1512–15, Colmar): Crucifixion This is the second opening of a complex altarpiece with multiple sets of folding wings. The four panels are, from left to right: Annunciation, Angel Concert, Madonna and Child, and Resurrection. Three of these are from the Life of the Virgin, and fit in well with Catholic Marian devotion. Yet they are also unique in their color, their intensity, their sense of movement. These are not paintings you sit back and contemplate; rather, they reach out and grab the beholder by the eyeballs. And even more so the Crucifixion that forms the centerpiece of the first opening.
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